


Some Girls are Bright as the Morning

by nigeltde



Category: Justified
Genre: Character Study, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-23
Updated: 2012-10-23
Packaged: 2017-11-16 21:34:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/544068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nigeltde/pseuds/nigeltde
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lovely what a little drink could do.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Some Girls are Bright as the Morning

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted to [Never Leave Harlan](http://nvrleaveharlan.livejournal.com/18571.html) as part of the Hillbilly Remix Challenge. Remix of an unspecified story by jenthegypsy. Many thanks to norgbelulah for her very helpful beta and amazing modding. Title from Gillian Welch's Dark Turn of Mind.

You a shrewd girl, her pa said, meant it well she knew but in the early morning that Givens boy had spat at her _Little piggy can't ride_ when it was him that knocked her off in the first place. She looked in the mirror and it was true, little piggy with her eyes all shrewed up.

So she flared all up inside watching her pa pour the tea in the nice china, and taking it she burned her fingers on the side, thin white cup that let the heat fall out.

Child, your brother is dead, said her pa in a soft way with his eyebrows down that flamed her love until it curdled. Jeremiah with his hair so short she could see his skin, scars from fights under there and his busted up nose, no more. But I know you is gonna do right by this family.

Sure you're right, she said, and grew up so.

::::

She had her babies one by one and then lost Margaret the girl knowing that there went the last true Bennett. Doyle tried cause he was a good-hearted steady boy and never found enough ways to solicit her devotion. Mornings he feeds her juice and burned toast and she gives him his kisses and sends him to school and finds herself halfway down a jar of apple pie, crying to Margaret and to her pa buried this long while and all of the rest of them stretching back.

Not your fucking yammering again says Pervis, slimemonger, contaminator, her one walking mistake. That baby is two years old now and you're gonna snivel him into faggothood. 

She is drunker than him, but she always held it better, and she hears the crack of his knuckles as he curls them up maybe before he even thinks of it, he throws himself around so automatic these days. She quits her tears and smooths her thumb over her baby's brow.

You think it's gonna stay like this, she tells him, and pulls her sneer deep enough down inside that he can't follow.

::::

They saunter in easy as you please when it's only been a week since the Givens boy broke up Dickie's knee. That one tips his hat and says ma'am, earnest. Helen had said he was a good one, lines too soon around her eyes blinking tired over rancid hospital coffee. Her sister married Arlo Givens, sure, but they could still be trusted to spot a good one. He's ashamed, she'd said, beatin' up on someone smaller – Mags you know it – but we taught him respect and he won't ever take what your Dickie was giving.

My son ain't never gonna walk the same. You oughta teach him to control his temper.

Mags, this cannot escalate. These boys are too young. 

A lie, as generations before had proved: too precious, Helen really meant, but thinking of her own three she had put down her coffee with gratitude and said yes. Now these two in her shop all gangle and eyelash, kidding round the fishing lines, the Crowder boy pretending to be almost as clever as he is and the other always watching; they could have run rings around Pervis, may he rest in dismay. 

Ma'am I'm sorry about your son Dickie, Raylan says when they bring their bait to the counter. She throws in a couple of Cokes and Boyd looks her in the eye and gives his thanks. Walking out towards the day they elbow and cram and the screen bangs open and shut around them like a proclamation.

::::

Changing the barn for the sun, sweet must of the autumn crop lingering behind her, she kicks a piece of shale and her vision tunnels forward to the hardscrabble life in store for her boys if they kept in the Bennett line. So many families scraping what they could out of this valley and the government trying to take most and the rest of it. All the new ways the feds had of ratting you out, even those only needed if the people stayed true and they were more and more doubtful as the years went on.

In the shadows of the house she drinks water out of the tap that can't clear nothing away, seeped through with a sour mineral taste, not like when she was a child. Sorrow puts her down like a dog, chair creaking to take her weight. 

Her boy Doyle in the force, that was good for him now and tomorrow, but her baby and Dickie, crippled and ill-fit? She taught them that family was all the circle they needed but she remembers when that porch outside had groaned with people and the dust had swallowed dancers like a mist, her pa's good china so long disused she doesn't even know where it is. She'd let the Bennetts fall away from the community, let her people slip out from under her, and next door waiting them godforsaken Crowders, jostling for every inch they could take and pulling others in too.

Go find them, girl, her pa calls to her in the echoing silence. You really just gonna wait around to fade away?

::::

I've seen you boys, she says, and he hides his face behind his hat brim and puts down the soda real slow, so she knows her guess was right. His change still sits on the counter, reflects the sun up to shine the coalsweat on his cheek.

Where did you see us, Mags? 

You oughta be more careful which hollers you go down, and he lifts his head and laughs at her with his eyes, not pale eyes like his fishbelly father but dark and young, laughing at her with his giddy secret. Such a boy. Where they go if not the hollers she can't think, maybe some Crowder hideaway, sneaking and drinking and laughing together. How could their mothers not know?

When she was seventeen she thought she had a veil like he thinks he has a hat, veil of cotton dresses and stern hard Harlan fortitude, Bennett blood that stood alone and broke the ground. Pervis had ten years on her and had her in his house and gave her children. She had no veil in there.

This county's got no love for people that got no love for it, she tells him. My husband's people, they wanted to suck this county dry. He died when Coover was two, and I raised my boys as Bennetts.

He sips his soda, polite, missing the point.

We teach it to our children, Raylan Givens, I know you ain't forgotten that, and that quails him, deep in his guts where he thinks of the Crowder boy. His knuckles go white and Pervis flashes to her. Pervis who showed her her foolish girl self, so long dead, the debt still rotting in her.

You think about that.

::::

I got news, momma, Doyle tells her with his mouth full. Roast chicken she made tonight, for their celebration, Doyle's first collected interest payment being beer in lieu of money. Not a bad way to start, she'd said when he hauled the case in; your friend is always gonna know he already failed us, and Doyle had grinned big and white. Boyd Crowder's back from Kuwait and working for his daddy.

How you know that? 

Cause I goddamn arrested him, Coover, Doyle says; Sorry darlin, when Sarah Jean frowns at him, like babies in the womb can hear. Too pious that one, ignoring even the drink provided special by her husband.

Who cares? 

They got an operation going, and Givens in it too like always.

The old man only, says Dickie. Raylan Givens ran away from Harlan County like the pansyass he is.

They know not to touch our line so far, she says. But as them boys get older they're gonna get greedy.

I ain't worried about no goddamn Crowder dynasty.

That Dickie ain't never been worried about anything is the worry itself. She let Doyle work too hard for him, maybe, left his skin too thin, hands too soft; she forgave him too much, after betraying him in a hospital cafeteria, let him sprawl undisciplined, another failure to swallow.

She sets her bottle down hard on his fingernail and ignores his yelp. Right now boy you worry about me.

::::

Eyes in a sweet blue that won't last, fixed unfocused on dancing air, evening dust blowing down the porch and pushing his three curls awry like combing fingers. She coos at him and pets and holds his bottle steady with a tenderness she'd thought sapped out with Coover's aging, that had not been touched with Doyle's eldest boy, coddled milksop. This one refuses to squall and she brings the disappointment out to him, little Jacob Jeremiah, grandbaby, unhearing and unknowing.

Another boy.

Surrounded by them. Frances Givens is dead, she tells him. Another undeserved wife, they ain't made like that any more. Take your momma. Which he doesn't, rather clutching at his formula with grasping hands. She sighs and apologises.

No, she ain't so bad; she just thinks there's an easy life to find. Some are born to that and they can't help it. 

She was never born to that herself, and she never bore her boys to it either; looking down though she begins to learn the desire, that such a babe might find something prettier, better, richer, than weed and death under the mountains.

::::

Mags Bennett, as I live and breathe. Now why would a respectable citizen like yourself be consorting with them types?

She stops the car, gun in her lap, and measures his smile. At least he got her on the way out, nothing on her but some Limehouse pork; a damn mistake to come without one of her boys, as she knew it would be – but he is drunk, past drunk, for any kind of work, only standing cause of the truck propping him up, bourbon in one hand, binoculars in the other.

You a scout now, Boyd? 

His laugh is quiet and wild. Maybe today I am.

You're gonna get yourself killed hanging around on this road, the people you been running with these days.

He hands out the bottle almost empty and she tips it up for the last rough mouthful, looking down again to a black-eyed barrel. She almost pities him. She was never meant for a bullet and anyway, now is not her time, not a tenth of the money she needs squirrelled away down in the holler behind her and Dickie and Coover still so unlearned and unready.

I think you went down there for more than just some pig. You off whisperin in ears again, Mags? Ain't that how you do business? So _civilized._

It never hurts, she says, and leaves him sitting by his tire, smothered in the tall grass.

::::

The girl's hair is just is fine as hers was at that age, but two shades lighter, running through her hands like silk, and her voice is high and strong.

That don't look like any apple pie I seen.

Go and play outside Loretta, there's a good girl. Me and Mrs Bennett have to talk business now.

She's a smart girl.

She's my whole world, says McCready, soft, eyes fallen outside the window where this daughter flies by on a little blue bike, pink strings off the handle she would have killed for as a child.

I remember how that is.

::::

Raylan Givens, she says, and he smiles at her and calls her ma'am. It has taken him months to come around to Bennett land, and she is surprised at how pleased she is to see him. He stayed lanky it seems, with a man's grace, and found a hat that fit him, and a nice jacket too, and a badge. This then is where his father's form has gone as the years bent and shrunk him, and good riddance. She laughs inside, victorious, to think of Arlo meeting this man, his cold discovery that he must step aside for those coming up behind. Life has a way of proving weakness like that. Crowder dead and Givens failing and her, a Bennett and a mother, won to hard truths running thick veins through the soil; far from diminished she is rich again with sons, daughters and futures.

You'll have some of my old apple pie, she says, and leans down for the jar.

::::

**-END-**

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback/concrit welcome.
> 
> [Rebloggable tumblr link for those so inclined.](http://nigeltde-fic.tumblr.com/post/131344683596/some-girls-are-bright-as-the-morning-2074-words)


End file.
